[lbo-talk] The myth of Obama blunders and weakness

[// ravi]

On Aug 1, 2011, at 10:25 PM, Bill Bartlett wrote:
> Carrol appears to be mixing up what Julio said, with what SA said in response. Not his fault, I see from SA's post that he failed to distinguish between his response and what he was responding to.
> 
> The first para quoted by Carrol is from Julio's post, but SA didn't put it in quotes or in any way distinguish it from his own comments.
> 
> Then Carrol quotes the conflated mess, confusing things even more. This sort of practice tends to make it hard, you have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out who said what.

Not to pick on Carrol or SA (who use Eudora and Thunderbird, I think, respectively), but:

The sad thing is that most mail readers (Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail) and webmail apps (Gmail, etc) provide, *by default*, a mechanism to quote the post one is responding to using the standard practise of adding a “>” in front of each line of the original post. But judging by the majority of the posters on this list, either the list is unique in membership (in terms of the number of users using esoteric mail programs) or it’s members are actively modifying their settings to sabotage this quoting feature. I don’t understand why either would be the case.

	—ravi